Confession of an apostate

It is official now. I, guardian of ways of Unix, failed and was raised as revenant of the dark side. Less metaphorically, I am writing this text on big Apple laptop provided by my employer, in vim running Void Linux inside of VirtualBox.

Why? Because I am exhausted by anguish about ethical borderline between good things -- /dev/tty1 and /bin/sh -- and bad things, like Firefox and Skype. I used to comfort myself thinking that there is solid line between things I do and things I am forced to do for my living, but now this line is unbearably blurry.

Last two years were hard. Survival in foreign country, parted from home and family, with another home -- Debian -- destroyed, is tough. Pandemic of COVID-19, that transferred a lot of things online didn't help either.

Using Zoom to find a job. Choice or forced? Amazon because I can't find slippers offline. Choice or forced? GitHub to get patch merged. Choice or forced? Google Maps because there are no paper maps in book stores. Choice or forced? Watching movies online with my spouse. Choice or forced? I guess you see the pattern.

Leaving question of free will aside, doing all this is much simpler and straightforward with work computer, which already has latest graphical browser and is well supported, while talking about GNU/Linux, most proprietary shit only supports Ubuntu, pretending that other flavors do not exist.

With this happening every day, there is little sense in having separate, pure and beautiful laptop with vim in /dev/tty1. And so I moved my personal stuff into work laptop, which already had GNU/Linux system in VirtualBox.

Now, with my computing environment containing pile of Apple's shit, worrying about extra dependency on libpam is stupid. So I dropped most of my Nix code that rebuilds packages to eliminate libpam and libsystemd -- it does not matter anymore.

I am tired navigating border between good and evil. Screw it. Now I am fine with anything that will not get me into a jail. Now I know exactly who am I: I am nobody.

That said, it bothers me that I am kinda betraying all people who worked hard to get idealistic, enthusiastic and reckless Free Software developer out of jail. I feel like I betrayed #freebogatov by becoming a human not worthy such effort. I am sorry.